January 21, 2010
LOCAL COMMENT
Focus on students in response to Detroit schools emergency
BY ROBERT BOBB
The fact that 3,324 metro Detroit residents have already pledged 402,145 volunteer hours this year to the new Detroit Public Schools/Detroit Free Press Reading Corps is encouraging in light of the extreme reading emergency facing this community. It is also a clear signal that citizens want the focus placed solely on the needs of the kids, so much so that they will give freely of their own time and resources to be a part of the solution.
In the debate taking place among leaders regarding academic governance of this school system, state House Education Committee Chairman Tim Melton asked the profound question: "Is there ever a time when academics are so bad that there needs to be some additional oversight?" I believe the discussion must focus only on what is best for kids, not on the needs and desires of adults. Some sort of emergency governance tool for academics is essential.
This should not be about who is in charge or about any one leader of this school system, but about righting the great wrongs that this school system has inflicted on far too many of its children.
If this is the focus, the agenda would follow one course: what must be done quickly to respond to the growing academic emergency facing Detroit, an emergency that goes well beyond reading scores and shows symptoms in every major measure of academic performance and student achievement. These indicators for the most recently completed school year in Detroit should not be viewed as discouraging, but as a call to act:
· The district has not made "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) for three consecutive years.
· 8,761 students were not promoted to the next grade, accounting for nearly 10% of the population. Among ninth-graders, a full one-quarter, or 2,616 Detroit students, were not promoted to Grade 10. High school students who are not promoted annually are off-track for graduation.
· DPS graduated just 58% of its students and showed a dropout rate of 27%, as of June 2008. For black males, the graduation rate is 49%, and the dropout rate is 33%.
· Currently, 8,983 non-special education high school students are "overage" for their current grade. This accounts for approximately 37% of the high school population. District-wide, 20,255 non-special education students are overage for their current grade, accounting for approximately 23% of all students enrolled.
· Of the 163 schools subject to measurement for "adequate yearly progress," 112 schools, or 69%, did not make AYP.
· The average daily attendance rate for students is 84%. In the 2008-09 school year, the average high school student missed 46 days of school. Nearly 10% of high school students missed more than 100 days of school.
· The district's composite American College Testing (ACT) score is 15.6; the national average is 21.1.
· Detroit students score from 22%-29% below the state average on MEAP reading, writing, math, science and social studies tests.
· And, on the more rigorous National Assessment of Educational Progress exam, 69% of the district's fourth graders and 77% of the district's eighth graders earned a score of "below basic," the lowest performance in any jurisdiction in the history of the testing program.
Who's to blame? Certainly not the children, but the adults who have maintained a system that has overwhelmingly failed those children and that, while there are pockets of excellence and many individual student success stories, has far from met the goal of creating centers of excellence for every child, every day, in every school in every neighborhood.
The time has passed for excuses, delays, partial steps and temporary solutions. The lives of tens of thousands of Detroit youths hang in the balance.
Robert Bobb is the emergency financial manager of the Detroit Public Schools.